Nat Williamson, previously a sharecropper, was the first black farmer to receive an FSA loan to purchase his farm. While the agency gave him 40 years in which to pay off the $2,980 loan, he managed to do so in seven.

mma Bettenhausen had given birth to 15 children when the photo was taken, and that she was then four months pregnant. She died of cancer eight months after her last child was born. “These are the only significant photographs of the family taken at the time,” Manning writes.